How to extract MP3 tags from filenames?

Introduction.

MP3 tags (also known as ID3 tags) contain important information about music
files, which allows easily recognizing songs, music pieces, audio books on
various sorts of MP3 players. The information typically consists of: title,
artist, release year, album, genre, etc. Many players offer interesting
features, if MP3 tags are available: for example, you can easily select all
songs from a certain genre, or by a certain artist, and so on.

Alas, these nice features will not be available if tag fields of your MP3
files are empty, even if filenames of the songs already contain necessary
information. Fortunately, there is an easy solution. You can extract MP3 tags
from filenames for thousands of files in just a few seconds using mp3Tag Pro.

Step 2: Start the program. Select MP3 files.

Navigate to the folder where your MP3 files are stored. You can use the left
upper area to pick out a folder directly, in the Windows Explorer style.

The MP3 files in our example do not have any tags at all. mp3Tag Pro
highlights such files with red.

Now we can click on the checkmark icon on the right (1) to select all files
(alternatively, press Ctrl + A on your keyboard) and then click on the
"Generate tags" button (2).

If your files are stored in different folders, you can use the "Scan
subfolders" button to show all files from the subfolders.

Step 3: Generate MP3 tags from filenames.

After we click on the "Generate tags" button, a new window will be shown:

Let's make sure that everything is ready for extracting tags. Just under the
"Format" field in the left upper corner, make sure that "From filenames" is
selected. This means that we will be extracting information from filenames.

Set the "Fields from tags" field to "Overwrite". This means that any
information already available in our tags will be replaced with the new
information. Alternatively, you can choose to overwrite only empty fields.

Below, you can choose individual fields that are to be overwritten. We have
selected Track#, Title, Artist, Genre, Album, and Year. All this information we
have in our filenames and folder names.

As you can see on our first screenshot, our files and folders follow this
naming convention: Genre\Artist\Year - Album\Track# - Artist - Title (track
track#).mp3

After we have recognized the convention, it is easy to translate it into the
program's variables listed next to the format field: %G\%X\%Y - %L\%# - %A - %T
(

Just a couple of comments. We have the Artist information in two places: as
a folder name and in the filenames. So, in our format we skip the folder name
by entering %X, this variable has no meaning, and so the program just skips
it.

At the end of each filename, there is information about track numbers in
brackets. We do not need it at all, so we simply add "(" to our format, telling
the program to import only information before the opening bracket.

Check if everything is correct (the preview area shows all tags that will be
created) and click "Generate tags" at the bottom to save information to the
files.

Now all our files are properly tagged. We can improve this further by
downloading album art and lyrics for the files (using the corresponding buttons
on the toolbar).